My daily readings 04/09/2010

Consider, for one example, Amazon’s Kindle clients for iPhone OS and Mac OS X. The iPhone OS Kindle app is excellent, a worthy rival in terms of experience to Apple’s own iBooks. The Mac Kindle app is a turd that doesn’t look, feel, or behave like a real Mac app. The iPhone OS Kindle app is a native iPhone app, written in Cocoa Touch. The Mac Kindle app was produced using the cross-platform Qt toolkit.

Update: To be clear, I do not think that Apple is singling out Flash CS5. I do think, though, that Flash CS5’s cross-compiler epitomizes the sort of meta-frameworks Apple is not going to allow. Same goes for MonoTouch. What Apple doesn’t want — and as we see now, is not going to allow — is for anyone other than Apple to define the framework for native iPhone apps. What Apple is saying here is, if you’re going to write a native iPhone app, then you need to target our platform; if you want to do something else, then target the iPhone with an optimized web app. I.e., the iPhone OS supports two software platforms: Cocoa Touch and the web. Apple isn’t going to let anyone else build a meta-platform on top of Cocoa Touch. I think this comment at Hacker News from “raganwald” nails Apple’s perspective on this.

“Beyond all the numbers, what it was really about, was this…” Laughter. “People are just loving this product. You know, when you create something, you have butterflies in your stomach before you put it out in the world, you don’t know if people will love it.”